Gone
by Bystander Effect
Summary: For once, Marik's not the insane one. He just wants to help, but it's too late. The short tale of Joey's insanity. Dark


Disclaimer: I don't own Yugioh or any of the characters in it.

**Gone**

Marik closes his eyes and lets the raucous laughter ring through his ears. The laugh is insanity, and the sweet hysteria is shaking slightly against his body. He rests his chin on a bony shoulder, his forehead against a soft mop of blond. He can smell the soft scent of unripe apples.

He never thought he would do this. Marik lets his arms rest gently around Joey and sits in silence while Joey laughs. Marik always thought it would be he who would scream insanities, and yet here he is, the sanest in the room.

Joey doesn't stop laughing. His laugh is high pitched, slightly forced, but unstoppable just the same.

Marik says one word.

"Joey."

He closes his eyes and weeps for what he cannot fix.

Marik could see Joey silently suffering. Second best, always, with a smile on his face. His final fall would be accompanied by laughter.

One day, Marik had approached Joey. "Are you okay? I mean, really okay?" he had asked with a tenderness foreign to him.

Joey had looked at him then, ready to laugh or smile or perhaps even shove. One glance into Marik's eyes, and his mouth had closed and set into a slightly down-curved line. "No, Marik, I don't think I am."

Joey would wake up feeling sick sometimes. There was no way to predict it, no way to stop it. He would wake up and be unable to stand up because the world would swirl away from him. It would take ten minutes for the world to stop spinning enough so he could go vomit in the bathroom. Then he would brush his teeth, change, skip breakfast and run to school.

Marik knew this because Joey knew this.

Joey had cuts. Along his arms. Down the backs of his legs. But he didn't know where they came from. He remembered very few of them being his fault. They just appeared in the mornings, some still leaking, others freshly scabbed. Marik remembered the first time he saw Joey's arms. They were a twisted mass of red lines and white scars. They made decorative patterns along his arms. Birds, angels, tears. Each line was different. Each line was special. Each line was part of a twisted picture that didn't make sense.

When Joey pulled up his sleeves for the first time, Marik had hugged him. It was nearly completely foreign to both of them, but they derived comfort from it just the same. They stayed in that position for well over an hour, doing nothing but feeding off their silence.

Joey saw things. He could see vibrant colors, colors stretching from a person's being into the sky. Sometimes the world turned black for him except for the multicolored stretching auras. He couldn't stand the colors, but no pills made them disappear.

Joey also heard things. Voices. Words. Mean voices. Disparaging, teasing, damaging. Second guessing. Too many voices filled his head, until he barely had time to hear his friends.

When Marik first heard the voices, he had felt cold slide up his spine and he curled into a ball. There was too many words, too many screams, and he couldn't hear and he couldn't think and he just couln't. For a brief moment, his Yami showed himself, unusually kind before hiding back into his container. Joey hugged him then, helping Marik ignore the voices that had cycled through Joey's head on a constant basis.

It was too much. The voices, the colors, the pain. Marik was almost driven to insanity. His yami touched his mind with a gentle hand, helped ban the demons from his mind and broke a spiritual bond he had carefully crafted with Joey to share the insanity.

Marik didn't see the colors anymore. He didn't hear the voices. He didn't feel the pain.

Joey was again left to suffer by himself. Marik hugs him, and he feels his Yami encircle his arms around Joey as well. His yami knows the insanity Joey suffers every day as well.

Joey had begun crying, silent tears that called out to the world. He had suffered their pain, their voices, their colors. Scars run across not only his skin but his spirit as well; huge gashes that no amount of plaster can fix tear the walls of his spirit room.

The Millennium Rod had shone brilliantly between Marik and Joey. The eye of Horus began to shimmer, and Joey's eyes rapidly turn blank. Marik let out a heavy sigh.

Slowly, surely, Joey had been sliding down. He had managed to hold for seven years, but he had then been dangerously close to falling. Even periods of mind control stopped working as therapy.

Marik released Joey from his magical hold. Joey blinked, and then sighed. He looked up at Marik.

"It's not working."

Always laughing.

Joey never gives a clue to the insanity he suffers, and in front of his friends he acts normal. But he and Marik have a secret bond, a very strong bond, and so Marik knows the lie. To his friends, Joey is happy and normal. To them, he is someone they can count on. To them, he is nothing more than second best.

To Marik, he is the world.

So now they sit, together and alone. Joey has lost, and the insanity is talking now.

Meaningless sounds, the sounds of hysterical laughter burn through the air.

Marik holds him gently, wishing for what their bond once was. An intense bond, a bond strong enough to help Joey cope with his insanity. A bond strong enough to share. Thanks to his yami, it no longer was. There were feelings, a desire to help, but sometimes, those things just aren't enough.

Marik could not hate his yami any more than he did at that moment.

"My yami's fault," Marik whispered. "But we'll get it back. You won't suffer alone anymore… I'll suffer with you."

Joey's insanity faded long enough for him to speak. "I couldn't have that Marik... this is my insanity."

And then, the laughter returned again.


End file.
